I have been searching the internet for days about theories on the very scarcely spoken about cange in the broadcast fiction after the horrific 9/11 events. The old styles of Amercian TV Series have now died out, with the last of them being Sex in The City and Friends. Both of these series show America’s and American’s naivity and vulnerability, in a way that is not serious and rather passive. Let’s face it, these were the TV Programmes that everyone in America, and most of the Western Culture viewed or knows about.

Now, Post 9/11, there is none to my knowledge of new programmes that show American’s is a bad spotlight in a way that Friends, Sex in the City etc used to do. The new ‘post-9/11′ programmes now include LOST, which shows mostly Americans surviving amongst other cultures, including a ex-Iraqi soldier, a Chinese couple (one partner whom only speaks Chinese) and an English Rockstar who happens to be a heroin addict. It could be said that the other cultures are shown to be less important to those American characters, but that is a whole new topic. The TV Programme basically has an underlying subject of Americans co-operating with other cultures and themselves to find a way off the island or to survive.

In conclusion, The Post-9/11 Theory is shown in American TV Programmes and The age of Sitcom’s such as Friends as died out with the tagic events of Spetember the 11th 2001.

As with a previous post, I’d quibble with you on the idea of post-media. The Internet is a medium and it imposes its own constraints. To take two that are obvious, the blogsphere is closed to anyone who is not literate and does not own a computer. More subtly, it is not open to people in cultures where letting it all hang out on a public forum is OK. In other words, privilege, money and culture can still shape the message, even if no one owns the media.

I don’t know whether any of this controverts your overall point about escaping from the single-voice authority of traditional media — but it I think it at least tempers your more enthusiastic embrace of the “openness” of the Internet. Much more open, I agree, more pluralistic and inclusive, but we’re not all in this pond yet and there are a lot of cultures and sub-cultures that may never feel comfortable swimming in these waters.

You also make a distinction between art and conversation, as if they were mutually exclusive. A lot of art is one-way in the way it is distributed, but that doesn’t make it either non-interactive or non-conversational.

The most obvious art form that is clearly conversational is jazz. And, perhaps something to reflect on at greater length — doesn’t the blog have the same kind of structure as a kind of extended set of riffs on a common theme? Perhaps your dislike of fictional monologues and preference for the blogsphere is similar to the way some people like the improvisational character of jazz over the composer’s monologue? But in any case, musical performance always has the character of a conversation, both between the musicians and between the musicians and the audience. It is more obvious in jazz but not restricted to it.

Even in less obviously conversational art forms, such as writing or painting, there is a tremendous amount of conversation going on. Any study of art history will reveal an ongoing dialogue, often inter-generationally as painters or writers respond to, emulate, differ with, and improvise on the works of other artists.

My suspicion is that human culture will always be, at its root, a conversation — even when power and money try to shout everyone down. Is the blogsphere a radical departure or simply a new affirmation and rediscovery of this basic truth?

What a huge steaming crock of shit. I didn’t see people lining up at bookstores just before midnight in order to buy Thomas Friedman’s latest, whereas J.K. Rowling seems capable of keeping both children and adults riveted to 500+ page bookstops of fiction.

No, what V.S. Naipul and Miller are trying to say is that fiction is no longer their exclusive domain. Fiction, like everything else, has metastasized into the culture at-large. Fiction is dead? Tell that to millions of video-gamers who immerse themselves into increasingly complex fictional worlds (narrative-rich “role playing games”are consistently the best-selling video game titles). Tell that to online websites filled to bursting with original short stories, novellas, and novels written by people frustrated with the pretentiousness of the print world’s gatekeepers. Tell that to J.K. Rowling, who’s now richer than the British Royal family for doing nothing more than telling stories.

Hell, go tell HBO that fiction is dead and watch them laugh their asses off.

This self-proclaimed “death of fiction” is as trite and meaningless a meme as was the much-ballyhooed “death of irony” shortly after September 11th. Maybe Miller and Naipul aren’t selling like they used to, but I can assure you that the need for fictional narrative is something that won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter how dark our “cultural moment” — after all, that the two greatest stories of all time — the Iliad and Odyssey — were composed by Homer during Greece’s Dark Age!

(Oh, and FYI: On Barnes’ & Nobles Top 100 Bestsellers, 4 of the Top Ten are works of fiction. America must not have gotten the message that fiction was dead.)

On Phil Carter’s recommendation, I picked up a copy of Sean Naylor’s book, “Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda” (for executive summary, I refer you to Phil Carter’s review.

Even if you think you know how the story plays out, this book is as gripping a page-turner as anything Tom Clancy ever produced.

For the present most blogs are commentaries not primary sources. This may make for interesting reading and participation, but doesn’t replace the watchdog role that the press has had since the invention of the broadside.

I think the shrinking of the role of news gathering is one of the reasons that scandals like Enron get as large as they do before they are exposed. Where are the reporters digging through government reports or even pending legislation?

People are busy and we all spend more and more time in front of screens. But fiction, as it is usually written, doesn’t go down well in electronic form. That doesn’t mean it can’t be, just that not many writers have tried to design stories, from the ground up, to be presented that way.

What would fiction designed for the on-line world be like? It would almost certainly be serialized. Presented in very short blocks, each intended to be read in minutes. It would use story arcs for the long form - that is, self-contained tales, told over weeks or months, with clear jumping on points for new readers. Individual installments would be available in RSS.

My own efforts along these lines can be found at http://www.fiddleandburn.com/blog. There’s a vibrant discussion going on about the theory and practice of on-line fiction at http://www.blogfic.com. I don’t think I, or any other on-line writer I’m aware of, has quite gotten it right yet, but we’re trying!

Don’t write fiction off yet. It just has to join the twenty –first century.

Jason Pomerantz

yadda…yadda…yadda…

The irrelevance of fiction didn’t necessarily start at 9/11. It started with the push of memoir that happened at the end of the 20th century. As memoir bloomed, fiction writers began to extrapolate on the old adage of “write what you know” by making their works more confessional, emotive and therapeutic for the authors. This has resulted in a boom in fiction that is neither uplifiting nor gratifiying, that focuses on the main character’s child abuse or mental illness or familial dysfunction, which most book reviewers are quick to point out as if these are the main selling points to the books.

Perhaps they are, as the prose in most fiction isn’t all that great.

I would rather read the well-crafted real-life story of someone who survived a tough life, a book like “Angela’s Ashes,” not the re-hashed, insincere fictionalizations of real life that’s rolling around in the fiction isles these days–so perhaps I’m a bit in agreement with you, Jeff. Sadly, there are few that can write like Frank McCourt–even with all the MFA’s out there, there is more emphasis on emoting and exorcising in fiction than on the craft of writing. Or at least it appears that way from the products that are hitting the shelves.

Perhaps this is the greater appeal of non-fiction. If fiction is to survive as a literary form, it has to become art again–the craft has to become superior to its current emotive and therapeutic nature. Yet given, as Rich states about the climate of “infotainment,” there’s probably going to have to be a cultural shift before the novel becomes central to our culture again.

I doubt blogs will effect that. But blogs can work to give us a sense of participation in the medium of infotaiment. When we vent our own strum und drang aren’t we kind of like “The Bachelorette” or “Survivor”? Just a thought….

The publishing houses are very simliar to Hollywood (no surprise since they’re all owned by the same people) in that they keep pumping out great scads of mass-appeal crappy fiction (which sells quite briskly, thank you), some highly overrated mid-level stuff (Franzen) and, yes, plenty of good stuff. More fiction books are published now than ever.

Yes, short story space in magazines has all but dried up, but that’s a totally different medium. The short story may be close to death, but that’s a death that had been going on before the Interwebs came on to the scene.

(Also, if you look at some of the reaction to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, you can see that some reviewers who were in New York at the time of 9/11 feel that “their” 9/11 has been co-opted. Case in point: http://nypress.com/18/15/news&columns/harrysiegel.cfm )

Jeff Jarvis, please contact me; I would like you to speak at Rutgers.

barbara reed
732/390-9124

The medium may be the message; it is not the author.